Friday, August 24, 2007
The difference set in rain
The rain outside is falling so hard that I feel it contains a note. In fact, I'm sitting up and humming it now. What a fabulous way to wake today! The note is not on any scale, and can't be juxtaposed to any other, yet it's many notes at the same time. See, if told you it was an F#, that would immediately place it within the context of a western tonal system, and you might think that it's a member of a minor chord, with a D# and A# accompanying it with full melancholy on either side.
But it's not. It's just a note. It's every note on a spectrum of sounds. The sound of rain falling is the same in Indonesia, but one may find a hundred notes to describe it, beaten out in a gamelan orchestra, whilst a master of strings in Japan plucks out a note that slowly vibratoes on the biwa.
In India, the sustained and fluctuating alap finds many notes in one breath of the nadaswaram, and the African thumb piano makes single plinks and ploinks and is sometimes an entire choir of high and low voices on its own.
Yet, no matter how we all hear the rain, it's an unmistakable sound, and it sounds exactly the same to every listener. The rain has subsided now, to a distant murmer, and I wake up thinking that today we'll forget the differences we ourselves carved into the unwitting rain.
fon @ 11:15 AM link to post * *